An emerging consensus for open evaluation: 18 visions for the future of scientific publishing

Diana Deca and I edited a collection of 18 visions for open evaluation and the future of scientific publishing. Our Editorial summarising the whole collection is here. The 18 individual papers are here, including my own vision, which is an elaborated and updated representation of the ideas I started to develop on this blog.

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3 Responses to An emerging consensus for open evaluation: 18 visions for the future of scientific publishing

This is a very thoughtful list of visions. There is one aspect, however, that is difficult to examine (or perhaps impossible): the role of self-interest in generating and pushing for these visions. Like with everything else in life, these visions are motivated in part by factors other than “the good of science”. For instance, some visions are likely to end up favoring large centers (e.g., the MRC) and big labs with many resources, whereas others may favor smaller places and smaller laboratories. To some extent, this seems a lot like a battle for setting the rules of the game, and when that happens everybody is biased towards stacking them in one’s favour. Happy to be proven wrong. It would be interesting to do an analysis correlating the type of vision and the institution of the person putting forward such a vision.

it’s always good to be skeptical when someone claims to have a vision for the greater good. what’s presented as serving the greater good might just serve the instigator’s own interest. however, at some level, every action can be characterised as ultimately selfish. doing science? volunteering in a third world country? giving your life to save another? you might just be in it for the recognition, or to feel good about yourself. while this is not incorrect, it is irrelevant if the effect of your work is actually positive. i think us visionaries of future scientific publishing are definitely selfish: we want to work in a better, more efficient system. and perhaps we want to be among the cool crowd that contributed to a positive change. but i think it’s hard to see how any of these broad visions is self-serving in a narrow sense of giving the authors themselves publication advantages if the envisioned system were realised.